Bruno Mars is amazing: a shapeshifting artist seemingly engineered to synthesize the history of pop music and overcome all critical resistance. His latest single with Cardi B, “Finesse,” is a perfect pastiche of the aesthetics of early 1990s pop radio R&B, from TLC videos to In Living Color’s Fly Girls and that Bell Biv Devoe snare drum.

I should say, it’s a pastiche of a particular subgenre of R&B — remember when R&B was dominant enough to have subgenres? — and hip-hop, one called New Jack Swing. New Jack Swing sort of emerged from the Minneapolis sound of Prince and Janet Jackson in the late 1980s, borrowing turntable scratching, stop-start percussive beats, and especially dancing and dance beats from hip-hop.

New Jack Swing helped break R&B out of its respectability ethos — think Whitney Houston, Anita Baker, etc. — and its reliance on tropes from soul, funk, and gospel music. It also had a transformative effect on hip-hop, helping it find a place on R&B radio, then dance shows, MTV, and the Top 40 charts. It was arguably even more successful at changing pop music in that period than alternative and grunge music were. And it’s some of the best pop music you’ve ever heard, music that turned producers like Teddy Riley and Bernard Belle, Babyface and LA Reid, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis into stars.

Inspired by Mars’s callback, MacArthur genius Lin-Manuel Miranda and Prince superfan Anil Dash teamed up to create a short primer to New Jack Swing. It’s a Spotify playlist, and despite its overlooking the later Teddy Riley work with Wreckz-n-Effect and Blackstreet, it’s magnificent. It certainly gives you all the tools to properly appreciate / hate on Mars’s appropriation of the genre.

Who is a person (not counting family) that opened doors for you in your career when they didn’t have to? Anytime is a good time to show gratitude!

Yesterday, I finished this podcast episode about Mister Rogers and they talked about when he made public appearances, either as an entertainer or a minister, he would often begin by asking the audience for a moment of silence to think about “the people who have helped you become who you are, those who cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life”. He even did it at the Emmys when accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award:

I’ve been thinking about Fred Rogers a lot lately…how much I miss him, how much I learned from him, and how much the world could benefit from his perspective and example right now. After this week/month/year, I think we could all use some of Mister Rogers’ radically compassionate humanism. So, if you wish, take a moment right now in silence to think about those who have cared about you and helped you become the person that you are.

It’s tempting to treat Prince’s “If I Was Your Girlfriend” as a genderscrambled version of Gladys Knight & The Pips’ “If I Were Your Woman” or Janet Jackson’s “If.” It’s really not. All three songs are great, but thematically and grammatically, “If I Was Your Girlfriend” is way more complicated than the others, and more intricate than almost any other song Prince wrote.

Prince is not just saying you’d be better off with him; he is not just saying that he wants to get in your pants. He’s not not saying those things, but Prince has written dozens if not hundreds of songs with that as his theme, and none of those songs are “If I Was Your Girlfriend.”

Prince is up to something. Even the usual interpretive trick for Prince’s songs — imagine that he is singing them to and about himself — doesn’t get you very far here.

Let’s start with that “Was.” We use the simple past “was” instead of the subjunctive mood “were” all the time, mostly because the subjunctive in English almost only shows up for a few irregular verbs like “were.” But there’s a songwriting tradition here; Prince knows it; every word is carefully chosen; we should take that “Was” seriously.

If I was your girlfriend, would U remember

To tell me all the things U forgot when I was your man?

The song is built on a series of conditional clauses, all of which are firmly set in the past. Was, would, could, sometime. Over and over again. Even when the singer lapses into something that seems like a present or present continuous tense, we get a counterpoint placing it in the past conditional again.

Sugar
Sugar, do you know what I’m saying 2 U this evening?
(If I was your girlfriend)
Maybe U think I’m being a little self-centered
But I, I said I want to be all of the things U are to me
(if I was your girlfriend)
Surely, surely you can see

That “this evening” is deixis — it’s pointing to say, “I am speaking these words HERE and NOW.” And it gets completely wiped away by the conditional past “If I was your girlfriend” and the conditional future “I want to be” and “surely you can see.”

This is an amazing song about intimacy, fantasy, the limits of gender roles, the limits of gender flexibility, a man’s full catalog of shortcomings and possibilities. This is also a breakup song, about heartbreak and desperation. It’s a song about a man putting the pieces of the past together and hoping they can add up to something more than they were.

Breakup songs are not exactly plentiful in the Prince catalog, although the ones he wrote were amazing. He wrote “Nothing Compares 2 U” for The Family because it didn’t fit the brand of progressive party pop he’d established for Prince and the Revolution. Sinead O’Connor covered it in 1989, after Prince had shifted his image with Sign O’ The Times, and everyone marveled (again) at his songwriting.

“If I Was Your Girlfriend” gets smuggled in as a Prince song at the right place and time. (Principle: every song on “Sign O’ The Times” is doing something other than what it seems to be doing.) The song is sexy because Prince is sexy. But the singer is losing the thread between past, present, and future. All those nesting dolls are collapsing. Even the marvelous, sensual come-on at the end, a desperate throw of the dice that pulls the song into the full future tense for the first time, gets framed as a dream:

And would you, would you let me kiss you there
You know, down there where it counts
I’ll do it so good, I swear I’ll drink every ounce
And then I’ll hold you tight and hold you long
And together we’ll stare into silence

And we’ll try to imagine what it looks like
Yeah, we’ll try to imagine what, what silence looks like
Yeah, we’ll, we’ll try to imagine what silence looks like
Yeah, we’ll try

The song seemed to evolve for Prince himself. In early live shows and the song’s official video above, Prince is the sexy seducer. Of course he talks his ex into bed. He’s Prince — the one and only — and his fans came to see a Prince show.

Later, he can’t do the splits any more. He’s sitting at the piano. The BPM is slowed down to about 80 percent. His eyes are closed. It’s a Joni Mitchell ballad.

Anil Dash, CEO of Fog Creek software, blogging pioneer, and Prince superfan, told me about these late performances of “If I Was Your Girlfriend”:

In his final shows, Prince would do the song in medley with Bob Marley’s “Waiting In Vain”, a song he only started playing very late in life, that seemed to have a lot of meaning for him.

[“Wait(ing) In Vain is one of the saddest songs I’ve ever heard, even in Bob Marley’s bouncey version. Prince’s cover on solo piano is devastating.]

In his last set of concerts, he’d pause the song to bring up a still of Streisand and Redford in “The Way We Were”, after the part where he says “if somebody hurt u, even if that somebody was me.”

It was one of the most honest and unexpected and sincere and heartbreaking things I think I ever heard him do. I was listening to audio of that in an airport in Tokyo a few months before he passed, and it brought me to tears, and it was one of the first things I returned to after I heard about his death. Was just as purely empathetic as I’d ever heard a straight man be in pop culture, and taught me a lot.

For me, losing Lou Reed was like losing a great teacher; losing Bowie was losing a hero; losing Phife was losing a best friend. But losing Prince, for many of us, was like losing the love of your life.

Anil Dash recently asked his Twitter followers: “If you could get everybody to read one book, what would it be?” Dash followed up right away with his answer: The Power Broker by Robert Caro.1 Here are some of the other interesting responses:

George Horace Lorimer was an American journalist and author. He is best known as the editor of The Saturday Evening Post. His Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son is a timeless collection of Gilded Age aphorisms from a rich man — a prosperous pork-packer in Chicago to his son, Pierrepont, whom he ‘affectionately’ calls ‘Piggy.’ The writing is subtle and brilliant.

Constructed around five major themes — play, organization, self, emergence, and coherence — A Simpler Way challenges the way we live and work, presenting a profound worldview. In thoughtful, creative prose, the authors help readers connect their own personal experiences to the idea that organizations are evolving systems.

In volume one of his America in the King Years, Pulitzer Prize winner Taylor Branch gives a masterly account of the American civil rights movement. Hailed as the most masterful story ever told of the American civil rights movement, Parting the Waters is destined to endure for generations.

In her comic, scathing essay, “Men Explain Things to Me,” Rebecca Solnit took on what often goes wrong in conversations between men and women. She wrote about men who wrongly assume they know things and wrongly assume women don’t, about why this arises, and how this aspect of the gender wars works, airing some of her own hilariously awful encounters.

In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men-bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden?

Cry, the Beloved Country is the deeply moving story of the Zulu pastor Stephen Kumalo and his son, Absalom, set against the background of a land and a people riven by racial injustice. Remarkable for its lyricism, unforgettable for character and incident, Cry, the Beloved Country is a classic work of love and hope, courage and endurance, born of the dignity of man.

Since its original landmark publication in 1980, A People’s History of the United States has been chronicling American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version of history taught in schools — with its emphasis on great men in high places — to focus on the street, the home, and the workplace.

Hillbilly Elegy is a passionate and personal analysis of a culture in crisis — that of white working-class Americans. The decline of this group, a demographic of our country that has been slowly disintegrating over forty years, has been reported on with growing frequency and alarm, but has never before been written about as searingly from the inside. J. D. Vance tells the true story of what a social, regional, and class decline feels like when you were born with it hung around your neck.

Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.

That’s a nice little syllabus for a What Is America? class. I’m not entirely sure what my answer would be. Infinite Jest is my favorite book, but I’m wary of recommending it to people — it was an important book for me but perhaps not for others. Maybe A People’s History of the United States or Isabel Wilkerson’s amazing The Warmth of Other Suns?

I’m still working my way through the audiobook, but it’s a great choice if you want to understand how the political sausage gets made.↩

This is your basic, salty, flat-grilled burger that you can get absolutely anywhere. If somebody gave me a blind taste-test between this and most other fast-food burgers, I might be able to distinguish In-N-Out, but it’s not guaranteed. It’s highly generic, as if culled together from a series of stock photos: bun, burger, watery lettuce, and a slice of tomato. Sure, you can get it Animal Style, but be honest: Animal Style sauce tastes like Whole Foods’ version of Big Mac sauce, except not as good.

They are in different leagues — an In-N-Out cheeseburger is $2.35 while a Shackburger goes for $5.29 — so a comparison is unfair, but in my mind, that extra $3 at the Shack buys you a lot of flavor. Still, as Kryza says, next time I’m in CA, I’m gonna get myself a burger at In-N-Out.

At the EyeO Festival in June, Anil Dash did a talk about Prince, “immigration & migration, artistry & technology, grave injustices & profound triumphs”. The talk is an examination of the past century of American history through the lens of Dash’s family history and one of the world’s greatest artists…well worth the 55 minutes it takes to watch.

When it launched, Amazon’s critics jumped to mock the company. Some called it a useless gimmick; others pointed to it as evidence of Amazon’s Orwellian tendencies. Then something weird happened: People decided they loved it. Amazon never releases data about how its products are selling, but Consumer Intelligence Research Partners issued a report this month saying that Amazon had sold more than 3 million devices, with 1 million of those sales happening during the 2015 holiday season. About 35,000 people have reviewed the speaker on Amazon.com, with an average rating of 4.5 stars out of 5.

Perhaps even more important to Amazon is how dozens of independent developers are writing apps that work with the speaker’s voice controls. You can use Alexa to turn off the lights, ask it how much gas is left in your car, or order a pizza. This is doubly surprising given how far behind Apple and Google the company was in the area of voice control when it started. The Echo may have seemed like a superfluous toy at first, but it now looks like a way for Amazon to become the default choice in a whole new era in the way people interact with computers and the Internet.

More positively, Echo is meaningful because it’s also the first hugely popular smart device that’s connected to a place rather than a person. (Video game consoles are obviously dedicated to the living room, too, but they’re a purpose-specific device, and none have crossed over into general app platforms.) Apps for places are different than apps for people.

One of the great debates around family, the social institution, is that gender parity cannot be achieved unless men are held as responsible for managing the second shift as are women. And, data show that many men are making that shift. It’s not yet a staggering number. It’s not a tipping point. But there’s maybe enough data for social scientists to agree that its a nascent trend: some men are becoming more involved in the critical minutiae of the second shift.

Maybe Dads love Alexa because Dads are suddenly as responsible for ordering the paper towels as Moms.

I don’t have one and I don’t think I’ll buy one anytime soon, but all this interest sure does make me curious.

The Kindle is sort of A Thing, but only because you can’t read the books sold for it using anyone else’s device or app…you have to use a Kindle or the Kindle app on iOS or Android. I mean, I love my Kindle, but if Amazon had any compelling competition in the e-reader space, it (or someone else’s reader) might be a lot better.↩

This year’s election reminded me of a piece that Anil Dash wrote almost ten years ago on our culture’s tendency towards liberalism. It’s my favorite thing he’s ever written and is one of the few pieces of writing that instantly shifted my thinking in a significant way.

Our ideas are winning, you see. When Reagan ordered the bombing of Libya in 1986, he didn’t make sure to urge Americans to have tolerance for people of Libyan descent living among us. But a scant 15 years later, President Bush made repeated calls for tolerance towards muslims in this country, not just out of what I see as his genuine motivation to do what was right, but also because the tenor of public discourse has changed that rapidly due to the tolerant influence of liberal philosophy. Gay marriage is still a big point of debate, but the presence of openly gay characters in mass media has changed in the same decade and a half from being scandalous to being clich’ed. It will be the burden of the next generation to hold the today’s conservatives to their record of homophobia, but it’s only a matter of time until that happens.

George W. Bush put out a message from the White House in honor of Kwanzaa. We’re winning.

It’s probably that sense of a slow, inexorable loss that makes conservatives terrified, causing them to respond with a desperate clinging to the past that only serves to further doom their cause. The best solutions, of course, lie in the future.

Tuesday’s election — an event that included reelecting a mixed-race President, legalizing marijuana in some states, legalizing same-sex marriage in some states, electing women to the Senate in record numbers, the election of the first openly gay Senator, and the defeat of many hard-line social conservatives — serves as a reminder that the country continues to move in a more liberal direction.

Further update: The Twitter data is bad, bad, bad, rendering Andy’s post and most of this here post useless. Both jumps in Twitter activity in Nov 2006 and March 2007 are artificial in nature. See here for an update.

Update: A commenter noted that sometime in mid-March, Twitter stopped using sequential IDs. So that big upswing that the below graphs currently show is partially artificial. I’m attempting to correct now. This is the danger of doing this type of analysis with “data” instead of data.
—

In mid-March, Andy Baio noted that Twitter uses publicly available sequential message IDs and employed Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ messages to graph the growth of the service over the first year of its existence. Williams co-founded Blogger back in 1999, a service that, as it happens, also exposed its sequential post IDs to the public. Itching to compare the growth of the two services from their inception, I emailed Matt Webb about a script he’d written a few years ago that tracked the daily growth of Blogger. His stats didn’t go back far enough so I borrowed Andy’s idea and used Williams’ own blog to get his Blogger post IDs and corresponding dates. Here are the resulting graphs of that data.1

The first one covers the first 253 days of each service. The second graph shows the Twitter data through May 7, 2007 and the Blogger data through March 7, 2002. [Some notes about the data are contained in this footnote.]

As you can see, the two services grew at a similar pace until around 240 days in, with Blogger posts increasing faster than Twitter messages. Then around November 21, 2006, Twitter took off and never looked back. At last count, Twitter has amassed five times the number of messages than Blogger did in just under half the time period. But Blogger was not the slouch that the graph makes it out to be. Plotting the service by itself reveals a healthy growth curve:

From late 2001 to early 2002, Blogger doubled the number of messages in its database from 5M to 10M in under 200 days. Of course, it took Twitter just over 40 days to do the same and under 20 days to double again to 20M. The curious thing about Blogger’s message growth is that large events like 9/11, SXSW 2000 & 2001, new versions of Blogger, and the launch of blog*spot didn’t affect the growth at all. I expected to see a huge message spike on 9/11/01 but there was barely a blip.

The second graph also shows that Twitter’s post-SXSW 2007 growth is real and not just a temporary bump…a bunch of people came to check it out, stayed on, and everyone messaged like crazy. However, it does look like growth is slowing just a bit if you look at the data on a logarithmic scale:

Actually, as the graph shows, the biggest rate of growth for Twitter didn’t occur following SXSW 2007 but after November 21.

As for why Twitter took off so much faster than Blogger, I came up with five possible reasons (there are likely more):

1. Twitter is easier to use than Blogger was. All you need is a web browser or mobile phone. Before blog*spot came along in August 2000, you needed web space with FTP access to set up a Blogger blog, not something that everyone had.

2. Twitter has more ways to create a new message than Blogger did at that point. With Blogger, you needed to use the form on the web site to create a post. To post to Twitter, you can use the web, your phone, an IM client, Twitterrific, etc. It’s also far easier to send data to Twitter programatically…the NY Times account alone sends a couple dozen new messages into the Twitter database every day without anyone having to sit there and type them in.

3. Blogger was more strapped for cash and resources than Twitter is. The company that built Blogger ran out of money in early 2001 and nearly out of employees shortly after that. Hard to say how Blogger might have grown if the dot com crash and other factors hadn’t led to the severe limitation of its resources for several key months.

4. Twitter has a much larger pool of available users than Blogger did. Blogger launched in August 1999 and Twitter almost 7 years later in March 2006. In the intervening time, hundreds of millions of people, the media, and technology & media companies have become familiar and comfortable with services like YouTube, Friendster, MySpace, Typepad, Blogger, Facebook, and GMail. Hundreds of millions more now have internet access and mobile phones. The potential user base for the two probably differed by an order of magnitude or two, if not more.

5. But the biggest factor is that the social aspect of Twitter is built in and that’s where the super-fast growth comes from. With Blogger, reading, writing, and creating social ties were decoupled from each other but they’re all integrated into Twitter. Essentially, the top graph shows the difference between a site with social networking and one largely without. Those steep parts of the Twitter trend on Nov 21 and mid-March? That’s crazy insane viral growth2, very contagious, users attracting more users, messages resulting in more messages, multiplying rapidly. With the way Blogger worked, it just didn’t have the capability for that kind of growth.

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

It’s important to keep in mind that these graphs depict the growth in messages, not users or web traffic. It would be great to have user growth data, but that’s not publicly available in either case (I don’t think). It’s tempting to look at the growth and think of it in terms of new users because the two are obviously related. More users = more messages. But that’s not a static relationship…perhaps Twitter’s userbase is not increasing all that much and the message growth is due to the existing users increasing their messaging output. So, grain of salt and all that.

What impact does Twitter’s API have on its message growth? As I said above, the NY Times is pumping dozens of messages into Twitter daily and hundreds of other sites do the same. This is where it would be nice to have data for the number of active users and/or readers. The usual caveats apply, but if you look at the Alexa trends for Twitter, pageviews and traffic seem to leveling out. Compete, which only offers data as recently as March 2007, still shows traffic growing quickly for Twitter.

[Thanks to Andy, Matt, Anil, Meg, and Jonah for their data and thoughts.]

[1] Some notes and caveats about the data. The Blogger post IDs were taken from archived versions of Evhead and Anil Dash’s site stored at the Internet Archive and from a short-lived early collaborative blog called Mezzazine. For posts prior to the introduction of the permalink in March 2000, most pages output by Blogger didn’t publish the post IDs. Luckily, both Ev and Anil republished their old archives with permalinks at a later time, which allowed me to record the IDs.

The earliest Blogger post ID I could find was 9871 on November 23, 1999. Posts from before that date had higher post IDs because they were re-imported into the database at a later time so an accurate trend from before 11/23/99 is impossible. According to an archived version of the Blogger site, Blogger was released to the public on August 23, 1999, so for the purposes of the graph, I assumed that post #1 happened on that day. (As you can see, Anil was one of the first 2-3 users of Blogger who didn’t work at Pyra. That’s some old school flavor right there.)

Regarding the re-importing of the early posts, that happened right around mid-December 1999…the post ID numbers jumped from ~13,000 to ~25,000 in one day. In addition to the early posts, I imagine some other posts were imported from various Pyra weblogs that weren’t published with Blogger at the time. I adjusted the numbers subsequent to this discontinuity and the resulting numbers are not precise but are within 100-200 of the actual values, an error of less than 1% at that point and becoming significantly smaller as the number of posts grows large. The last usable Blogger post ID is from March 7, 2002. After that, the database numbering scheme changed and I was unable to correct for it. A few months later, Blogger switched to a post numbering system that wasn’t strictly sequential.

The data for Twitter from March 21, 2006 to March 15, 2007 is from Andy Baio. Twitter data subsequent to 3/15/07 was collected by me. ↩

[2] “Crazy insane viral growth” is a very technical epidemiological term. I don’t expect you to understand its precise meaning. ↩

The cover story of the December 9th issue of Science News, The Predator’s Gaze, is about psychopathy. The whole article is worth a read, but the brief description of psychopathy at the beginning got me thinking about something that Anil Dash wrote the other day. He highlighted a review of a B&B made by a potential guest that was upset that his many attempts to persuade the owners to accept his expired gift certificate. Anil labeled this person a sociopath:

As a public service, I offer you my analysis. This quote is how you can tell this guy is a sociopath. Not that he merely went online and vented to random strangers about his greediness. No, rather, that he was willing to concede his own willful ignorance (or illiteracy?) while complaining. The web is littered with these chuckleheads who point out their own sociopathic behavior while complaining about others.

At dinner the other night, a group of us were talking about a particularly irksome message board contributor and the subject of sociopathy came up again. This particular person seemed to be oblivious to the rules of the board, didn’t pick up on the social cues of other participants or moderators to modify his behavior, and was making public personal attacks against others while complaining that others were doing the same to him, even though they were not. Anyone who runs a community site, has comments on their blog, or participates on a message board knows this guy — and it usually is a guy. He’s the fly in everyone else’s ointment, screaming in the middle a quiet conversation, and then says things like “if you hate me, I must be doing something right”.

Psychopaths lack a conscience and are incapable of experiencing empathy, guilt, or loyalty.

People with psychopathy don’t modify behaviors for which they’re punished and don’t learn to avoid actions that harm others, Blair proposes in the September Cognition. As a result, they fail to develop a moral sense, in his view. Blair’s theory fits with previous observations that psychopaths have difficulty learning to avoid punishments, show weak physiological responses to threats, and don’t often recognize sadness or fear in others.

He views psychopathic personalities as the product of an attention deficit. Psychopaths focus well on their explicit goals but ignore incidental information that provides perspective and guides behavior, Newman holds. Most other people, as they take action, unconsciously consult such information, for instance, rules of conduct in social settings and nonverbal signs of discomfort in those around them.

Sounds a lot like the fellow we were discussing at dinner. I don’t think most of the people that demonstrate antisocial behavior in comment threads are actually psychopaths or sociopaths (there is a difference) in real life. Rather, interacting via text strips out so much social context and “incidental information” that causes some people to display psychopathic behavior online and fail to develop an online moral sense.

Thinking about disruptive commenters in this way presents an interesting challenge. According to the article, psychopathy seems to be genetic in nature and curing people of this extreme antisocial behavior can be difficult. An Australian study cited in the article found that boys with behavioral problems reacted better to rewards for good behavior than to punishments for bad behavior. Maybe looking for ways to reward bad online community members for their good behavior as well as trying to replace some of the stripped away social context is the way forward. (A quick idea for replacing some social context: add a graphic of eyes to the text-posting interface?)

If you’ve ever used any of the various menu sites out there, you may have noticed that the menus are occasionally not as up-to-date or complete as they could be. A typical response in the blogosphere to a situation like this is to fire off a snarky missive about how menu sites suck, wish harm on the site’s owners and their children, and why don’t they just die already, those sucking bastards, and basically overreact in such a way as to make the writer feel temporarily better and all but ensures that nothing constructive comes of it.

Since its launch last year, I’ve admired the tone of Eater, a site about New York city food and dining. The site strikes the right balance between criticism, enthusiasm, insider knowledge, and detatched reportage while covering a topic where too much of any one of these is deadly for the reader. Last week, Eater took note of the menu site situation, but instead of just complaining, they went looking for some evidence and reportedthe results:

Last week, Eater began an exhaustive investigative series called MenuGate. For those who think we’d forgotten about it, ten-hut. Tomorrow morning, we’ll be conducting a SPOT INSPECTION of the major menu site players, then scoring them on how accurate (or inaccurate) their menus are. The benchmark will be the menu that’s freely available, at this very moment, on the restaurant’s official website.

In canning the snark, offering fair criticism, and letting the results speak for themselves, Eater made it possible for the menu sites to respond in a congenial fashion:

We saw you chose 11 Madison Park this morning to do a menu comparison and our menu was out of date. To be fair, we waited to let you investigate the differences before we updated the menu, even though we noticed the menu had changed. In any event, now that you’ve written your piece, we have updated the menu as we do for restaurants everyday. We have a team specifically assigned to update menus and we receive user submissions as well to let us know about restaurant changes.

The end result? The situation improved for everyone. A small improvement perhaps, but MenuGate is an ongoing Eater feature so we can expect future improvements. And perhaps when the menu sites get tired of taking their lumps each time around, MenuGate may lead them to think of better ways to keep their menus up-to-date and useful. Anil Dash wrote a post two years ago about how bloggers could take positive action against “Stuff That Sucks”:

I’m proud of what [bloggers have] done in creating so many different weblog communities, and I don’t want our legacy to be one of having the positives overshadowed by our frequent, though understandable, tendency to be unkind or uncivil to those we’re communicating with.

The way Eater has approached the menu sites issue is certainly a good example of what Anil was talking about. Good show.

Anil Dash writes that “intellectual dishonesty is a powerful tool, and should only be used in service of important and valuable causes”. He and I have argued about this before so I think he’s being serious (and not just being intellectually dishonest), but I think that statement is pure horse plop.

Over the past two weeks, David Jacobs, Anil Dash and I have attempted to reproduce (in some halting way) Jason Kottke, while the actual Jason Kottke was in rehab on his honeymoon. The attempt, on my part at least, has been an abject failure. Or haven’t you noticed all the crappy links with “GK” at the end of them? Go-kart magazines? What the hell?

Like most of the disasters I’ve had a hand in, I’ve got a theory that both explains what happened and exonerates me. Ducking responsibility sounds better if you put on academic airs about it.

The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. Kottke is one. I, now two weeks too late in realizing this, am another.

The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.

The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.

There’s nothing here to imply that one type of blogger is better than the other. There are literally thousands — OK, hundreds… OK, at least a dozen — of both kinds that are valuable additions to the on-going conversation/food-fight/furry-cuddle that is the Internet. My point is that Jason Kottke is a very, very good referential blogger and I am a very, very bad one. And I’m sure I wouldn’t have trouble finding a link that expresses this sentiment (many, many times over, with varying degrees of vehemence), but I’d rather say it from my own experience:

I’m going to be away for a couple of weeks, but my pal Greg Knauss is taking over posting some remaindered links while I’m gone, aided by special guests David Jacobs and perhaps even Anil Dash.

Greg was the very first guest blogger here on kottke.org (and perhaps the first guest blogger ever anywhere) back in March of 2000 when I went to SXSW and they didn’t have wifi at the conference (nor did I have a laptop). Good times, back then.

Anil on the conservatism of liberalism (by way of explaining why Craigslist is taking away everyone else’s classifieds business). “A complete unwillingness to be critical, an almost astoundingly low set of criteria for acceptance — these aren’t the traits that encourage a community or a culture to improve.”

You can now post from Microsoft Word to your Blogger blog. More interesting to me is how former Pyra folks remember this old idea. Matt says it was “something we talked about building back when the blogger api was brand new” and that Anil Dash, then a Blogger enthusiast, knocked up a working prototype (which I also remember). Ev says it’s “a product that I first thought about five years ago”. Both accounts are no doubt accurate, but how they’re remembered is interesting.

Meg and I saw a “don’t close us down” petition on the counter when we stopped in last week, but I didn’t know the story behind it until I read the article. I hope it doesn’t get shut down. Jones Diner is part of that neighborhood’s culture and history. Cities need places like that…they add diversity, character, culture, and history to the neighborhoods in which they are located.

Andrew Glassberg, one of the folks trying to build an upscale modern diner in place of Jones Diner, asserts “we are all about eggs and burgers [and we] want that classic diner feel”. He’s missing the point; it’s not just about the type of food or some carefully crafted & marketed “classic diner feel”, it’s a lot more than that. When we were there the other day, about five minutes after we had ordered, a man walked in with hellos to both men working behind the counter, obviously a regular. Four minutes after that, way before we got our food, the man dug into a turkey dinner which he hadn’t ordered, but which they knew he wanted anyway. That’s just a taste of what places like Jones Diner give you in the context of a neighborhood that a modern diner just can’t.